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Aligning with the Port of Seattle’s goal to become North America’s greenest port, REGEN AEC partnered with Orenco Systems to transform the historic Ship Supply Building at Fishermen’s Terminal into the Maritime Innovation Center. The project is pursuing full certification under the International Living Building Challenge, which requires the building to capture its own water and treat its own waste on site. To meet that bar, REGEN designed a closed-loop, on-site blackwater treatment and reuse system sized for a low design flow of 400 gallons per day within a fixed mechanical footprint, engineered to Washington’s then-draft Onsite Non-Potable Water System rules and built with multiple treatment barriers to meet strict pathogen log-reduction targets.

The system captures all wastewater on site, including toilet and urinal flows, and treats it through a multi-barrier train: solids separation and anaerobic digestion, an Orenco AdvanTex textile filter, tubular ultrafiltration, and dual UV light and electro-chlorination disinfection, with real-time monitoring that automatically diverts off-spec water to the municipal sewer. Now operational, the system cuts potable water demand for toilet flushing and irrigation, gives the Port of Seattle a working model for on-site water reuse in an industrial setting, and provides a permitting precedent for similar projects under Washington’s new on-site reuse rules.